Sunday, May 31, 2015

What Feeds Beneath

While on an expedition at Todos Santos in south Baja California, Mexico, Alejandro Prieto was searching for big predators—such as marlins, sharks, or tuna—feeding on sardine bait balls, but instead he found this Hawaiian petrel feeding on crustaceans. “Luckily I was able to capture the moment it submerged its head to feed on the tiny food source,” Prieto writes.



from National Geographic http://bit.ly/1eLdmMo

Saturday, May 30, 2015

The Power of Few

“The night before this photo, we tried all day to get a good photo of the endangered white rhino,” writes Stefane Berube, who captured this shot at the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary in Uganda. “Skulking through the grass carefully, trying to stay 30 feet away to be safe, didn't provide me the photo I was hoping for. In the morning, however, I woke up to all three rhinos grazing in front of me.” Berube used a 50mm lens rather than a wide-angle lens or telephoto “because of its sharpness and similarity to how our eyes perceive depth in real life.”




from National Geographic http://ift.tt/1JaSTxa

Friday, May 29, 2015

Model Behavior

“I was in Kingston, Jamaica, volunteering at an HIV ward at Missionaries of the Poor and trying to learn how to do fashion photography,” writes Justin Anantawan. Working with amateur models, Anantawan spent the day near an abandoned fort at a beach in Port Royal, capturing this shot at sunset. “The shoot was very simple—I just bought some striped fabric and chiffon from a store in downtown Kingston, wrapped it around the men, and then let the scenery and ocean breeze do the rest of the work. The man on the right held up the chiffon, and I took around ten shots before I captured the fabric at the just the perfect moment.”



from National Geographic http://ift.tt/1dCOpm6

Insect mating behavior has lessons for drones


New 'designer carbon' boosts battery performance


Researchers engineer E. coli to produce new forms of popular antibiotic


A patient's budding cortex -- in a dish?


Sharp-eyed Alma spots a gigantic flare on famous red giant star


Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way


Trees are source for high-capacity, soft batteries


Parental smoking puts nearly half a million UK children into poverty


Thursday, May 28, 2015

Bird Feeders

Abderazak Tissoukai was near Xingping in China’s Guanxi region when he captured this picture of a cormorant fisherman at sunset. “Xingping is definitely one the most beautiful places in China, with its scenic karst landscapes [and] traditional and genuine people,” he writes. Curious to learn more about the local practice of cormorant fishing—in which trained birds with snared throats capture fish they’re unable to swallow—Tissoukai took a high-speed train from Zhuhai to Xingping to shoot fishermen on the Li River. “I wanted a complete, iconic definition of cormorant fishing,” he writes.



from National Geographic http://ift.tt/1dB3lRF

How comets were assembled


Even when we're resting, our brains are preparing us to be social


Implicit social biases made to drop away during sleep


Scientists retrieve lost memories using optogenetics


Dinosaurs were likely warm-blooded


Estimating the global burden of cancer in 2013; 14.9 million new cases worldwide


Donuts, math, and superdense teleportation of quantum information


Long life: Balancing protein and carb intake may work as well as calorie restriction


Ethiopian and Egyptian genomes help map early humans' route out of Africa


Spinning a new version of spider silk


Astronomy: Link between mergers and supermassive black holes with relativistic jets


Roadside air can be more charged than under a high-voltage power line


Unexpected brain structures tied to creativity, and to stifling it


Super-efficient light-based computers


Birds, not just mammals, copy yawns


Parachute Testing for NASA's InSight Mission


Below-normal Atlantic Hurricane Season is likely this year


Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Light in the Dark

Dancers pause during the Sinulog Festival in Cebu City, the capital of the Philippine province of Cebu. The large festival of cultural and religious pageantry honors the Santo Niño, or child Jesus, whose statue is held aloft here by a colorfully costumed “queen.”

Jumangit’s image was recently featured in Your Shot’s Daily Dozen.



from National Geographic http://ift.tt/1dyWfwP

Sex chromosomes: Why the Y genes matter


Solid-state photonics goes extreme ultraviolet


Tiny parasite may contribute to declines in honey bee colonies by infecting larvae


Lethal wounds on skull may indicate 430,000 year-old murder


Diagnosing cancer with lumninescent bacteria: Engineered probiotics detect tumors in liver


New algorithm lets autonomous robots divvy up assembly tasks on the fly


Brain signals contain the code for your next move


Robots can automatically recover from damage in minutes


New human ancestor species from Ethiopia lived alongside Lucy's species


Quantum magnetic ordering: Moving out of equilibrium


Theory of everything? How spacetime is built by quantum entanglement


DNA: Expanding code of life with new 'letters'


Any dose of alcohol combined with cannabis significantly increases levels of THC in blood


View From an F-15D


Clever snail? Animals, like humans, excel at some tasks but not others


Similarities between aurorae on Mars and Earth


What our solar system looked like as a ‘toddler’


Toddler temperament could be influenced by different types of gut bacteria


Tuesday, May 26, 2015